Cambridge Analytica Is Shutting Down [Updated]

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On Wednesday, Cambridge Analytica employees learned that its parent company, the SCL Group, was shuttering the business, with American-based workers directed to return their keycards immediately, according to documentation reviewed by Gizmodo.

The news was announced during a conference call led by Julian Wheatland, the current chairman of the SCL Group who was reportedly tapped to take over as Cambridge Analytica’s next CEO. Both Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections (the SCL Group subsidiary connected to Cambridge Analytica) will now close their doors.

During the call, Wheatland said that the board determined that rebranding the company’s offerings in the current environment is “futile.”

Cambridge Analytica and the SCL Group have offices in London, New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The conference call was originally scheduled for Tuesday morning, but was repeatedly pushed back until early Wednesday afternoon, ultimately getting rescheduled more than half a dozen times.

Screenshots from the company’s internal chat service obtained by Gizmodo show a darkly comic mood in anticipation of the call. One employee shared bleakly titled Spotify playlists in Slack featuring songs like “High and Dry” by Radiohead, “The End” by The Doors, and “Help!” by The Beatles. Another employee posted a still from Titanic showing the ship’s band playing their instruments as the vessel sinks.

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In explaining the decision to close the offices, Wheatland cited the ongoing investigations into Cambridge Analytica’s massive data harvesting scandal, damage to the company’s reputation, and loss of clients. In March, Britain’s information commissioner announced that she was seeking a warrant to investigate any misconduct by the data analytics firm, looking to search both its offices and its servers. UK authorities raided the London office later that month, but have yet to release their findings. Meanwhile, embattled former CEO Alexander Nix refused to testify before the British Parliamentary media committee regarding the firm’s misuse of Facebook user data.

We have reached out to Cambridge Analytica for more information and will update this story if we hear back.

Update 2:10pm: Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, SCL Group founder Nigel Oakes confirmed that both Cambridge Analytica and the SCL Group are shutting down.

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Update 3:10pm: In a press release, Cambridge Analytica announced that it, SCL Elections, and other affiliate companies have filed for insolvency in the UK, with bankruptcy proceedings in the US to follow.

“Despite Cambridge Analytica’s unwavering confidence that its employees have acted ethically and lawfully, which view is now fully supported by [a third-party audit], the siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the Company’s customers and suppliers,” states the release. “As a result, it has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business, which left Cambridge Analytica with no realistic alternative to placing the Company into administration.”

Update 4:56pm: Asked for clarification, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Oakes said the entire SCL Group—not just subsidiary SCL Elections—was shutting down. We have updated our story to reflect this information

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If you are a current or former Cambridge Analytica employee with information about the layoffs or the company’s internal affairs, you can email me at melanie.ehrenkranz@gizmodo.com. You can also contact us anonymously using SecureDrop.

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Melanie Ehrenkranz

Reporter at Gizmodo

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Study: Future Teachers Are Already Biased Against Black Children

Image: StockSnap (Pixabay)

That black school children are treated more harshly than white children by teachers is no secret, as plenty of studies and painful anecdotes have repeatedly shown. But some recent research published in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology suggests an even more discouraging reality: The incoming generation of teachers shows bias against black kids, too.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and elsewhere recruited 40 college students (most of whom were white) who were training to become teachers. They asked the volunteers to look at pictures of 20 black and white men and women, and then to identify one of five emotions the actors were showing (happiness, anger, surprise, sadness, or fear). A previous experiment by the researchers used 20 human volunteers and facial recognition software to pinpoint the emotion shown in each photo.

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For a separate test, the volunteers watched four videos depicting a black and white boy in elementary school. One pair of videos had the boys doing something that could be seen as callous, with the black boy stepping on someone’s homework with muddy shoes and the white boy walking away with someone else’s handheld video game. The other two videos featured actions more likely to be seen as unintentionally insensitive: the black boy made a possibly rude comment about another student’s work, and the white boy put someone else’s work in the trash while cleaning up. For all the videos, the volunteers were asked to rate how hostile the boy was on a scale from one to five.

In the photo task, the volunteers were consistently worse at guessing the emotions of both black men and women. Overall, black faces were more than twice as likely to be misread than white faces. And when it came to anger, the misreading was even worse. Black faces were four times as likely to be mistakenly seen as angry.

With the video test, the volunteers similarly attributed more malice to black boys. On average, the hostility rating of black boys was 3.37, while the average rating of white boys was 2.25. And even in the scenarios where the boy seemingly meant no harm, the average point difference in rating between white and black boys stayed the same.

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“We really worked hard to make these visual stimuli all comparable to each other, so it’s really something that’s in the receiver that’s going on here,” lead author Amy Halberstadt, professor of psychology at North Carolina State, told Gizmodo. “This is highlighting very specific ways racial bias might be playing out.”

Though research has shown that black boys in particular are discriminated against in school, receiving higher rates of suspensions, expulsions, and other disciplinary actions than everyone else (even when accounting for other factors like poverty or grades), Halberstadt and her team note black girls have their own set of challenges.

“For instance, expectations for females to be more emotionally expressive than males coupled with stereotypes of black people being angry and aggressive make black girls likely targets for being labeled as ‘out of control’ or overly assertive in the classroom,” they wrote. According to Halberstadt, the study’s findings are some of the first to empirically show that a similar bias for seeing anger exists toward black women as well as men. But other qualitative research—relying on interviews and surveys of schoolchildren—has found black girls are more often singled out for not being “ladylike” compared to white girls.

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These misperceptions have real consequences. White (but not black) teachers have been found to underestimate the academic talent and learning capability of black students, even as early as preschool. And the less confident teachers are in their black students’ academic prospects, the less likely the students are to succeed, other research has shown.

Of course, these biases aren’t unique to teaching. Racial discrimination poisons every avenue of life in the US, from job-seeking to online dating to getting medical care. “There are many things in our culture that are directing people to have these biases,” Halderstadt said, “so none of us are immune to them.”

As sobering as the findings are, Halderstadt believes these sort of studies can be the start of a larger conversation for prospective and current teachers to have about how they will interact with their students (along with everyone else). “If we don’t even know that we’re doing this, then we can’t change. So the first step is to become aware and then we can work on our changes,” she said.

At the same time, simply knowing about our prejudices isn’t enough.

“The big picture is that teachers can know they have bias, but that’s a very broad statement,” Halberstadt added. “What this suggests to me is that [one way to address bias] is through understanding emotion. Teachers may need to think about whether they’re understanding the emotions of black people as well as they are of white people.”

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The study’s small sample size means that only limited conclusions can be drawn from the results. But Halberstadt and her team are already following up with larger studies examining teacher bias, as well as how it affects their students.

[Contemporary Educational Psychology]

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Ed Cara

Science writer at Gizmodo and pug aficionado elsewhere

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Facebook Admits to Major Screw-Up That Silently Unblocked People Without Asking

Source: Facebook

Facebook disclosed a new “bug” on Monday that temporarily let some users who’d been blocked on the service send messages to the people who had blocked them. The bug also let some previously-blocked users view posts that were shared “to a wider audience,” such as publicly or with friends of friends, Facebook said.

Facebook’s privacy boss Erin Egan apologized for the error, writing in a blog that the company is reaching out to “over 800,000" users about the screw-up. The “blocking bug” was active between May 29 and June 5, for eight days, though the company now says Messenger should be acting normally.

Egan’s post details the features of this newly disclosed bug.

  • It did not reinstate any friend connections that had been severed;
  • 83% of people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked temporarily unblocked; and
  • Someone who was unblocked might have been able to contact people on Messenger who had blocked them.

It isn’t clear when Facebook discovered the bug or how many people were actually contacted by the people they’d blocked. It’d be interesting to know if Facebook discovered the issue itself, or after users complained about unblocking. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information.

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Facebook’s announcement post closes by mentioning the serious consequences of a faulty blocking system, chiefly harassment or bullying, both significant issues that are exacerbated when platforms make mistakes like this.

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Sidney Fussell

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